Dust

by Jason Hutt

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Raji said, “How do I know you’re not suffering from the psychological effects of your incarceration. A doctor will be available in the morning. You’re going to have to do a full psychological screening before you’re deemed healthy enough to be trusted. Beyond that, we’ll need to clear up the kidnapping charges with your father. He was apparently en route when we contacted him with your whereabouts.”

  “I bet he was,” Nick said snidely.

  Raji nodded and said, “Yes, he’s on his way. He said he’ll be here by tomorrow evening. We have explicit instructions to hold you until he arrives and has a chance to speak with you.”

  Nick leaned his head back abruptly in the chair, whacking the back of it on the cold metal. As he continued to answer procedural questions from Officer Raji, he remembered that his wrist computer was still shut down. Nick activated it and within moments a message popped up.

  Found you! Looking forward to catching up! - Love, Father.

  Nick clenched his fist and shook his head.

  “Something wrong?” Raji asked.

  “Nothing at all,” Nick said. He punched in a reply and sneered as he hit send.

  Looking forward to it, too. About time I did this. - Nick

  Chapter 9

  While Max spent the night huddled in the corner of his holding cell, trying to shield his eyes from the bright overhead lights, Nick was shuffled from one room to the next. Oh, the officers said they were trying to find him a quiet place for him to rest, but it seemed every time he was on the verge of sleep someone found a reason to move him.

  By the time he was dragged in to the psychiatrist’s office, his eyes were heavy and red-rimmed and his skin felt clammy, coated with a dried layer of sweat. Nick always tended to sweat a bit more when he was over-tired. He also had a bit of a splotchy five o’clock shadow as patches of uneven fuzz blotted his face. He felt gross.

  The attending doctor, a very fit and attractive young woman, Doctor Paige Barckowitz, looked up from her comfortable, brown, synthetic leather chair and appraised Nick with an unyielding stare. Nick sat opposite her, focusing very hard on keeping his eyes focused on her eyes or other parts of the room and nowhere else below her neckline. With her long, silky brown hair and deep blue eyes, Nick found her absolutely stunning.

  She didn’t waste any time with small talk and jumped right into the questions.

  “Tell me about your relationship with your father?”

  “Strained,” Nick responded, his voice distant and shaky, “We haven’t gotten along well these last few years.”

  Nick had spent half the night thinking about what he would say when he finally confronted his father. He had struggled to find anything that wouldn’t result in some punches being thrown.

  “Have you tried to run away before?” Paige asked.

  Nick smiled and absentmindedly picked at the seam on his pants.

  “You could say that.”

  Paige was just about to ask another question when the lights turned from white to red. Within seconds he heard booted footsteps running down the corridor past the office.

  “What’s going on?” Nick asked, trying to turn around and face the doorway.

  “I’m not sure,” she answered, her tone as curious as Nick’s. She got up and walked over to her desk. There, she looked at the display built into the desktop and tapped the intercom. While she was at the desk, the door to the office slid shut. A click was heard as the door locked.

  “Captain, what’s going on?”

  “Doctor Barckowitz, we’ve got a security situation. We’re on lockdown,” the Captain’s voice came through. He was breathing heavily and Nick could hear the rapid clangs of many pairs of boots ringing off the metal floor. “Don’t have much info at the moment. We’ll give the all-clear as soon as we can.”

  Nick watched her type a few more things into the desktop. She stood there for several minutes, trying to access something. The frustration on her face grew.

  “What is it?” Nick asked. She looked up with a bit of a blank stare.

  “Oh,” she responded, “I was just trying to access some of the security camera feeds to find out what was going on. I can’t access anything though.”

  Nick stood up from his chair slowly and made his way toward the desk. She locked eyes with him for a moment and he gave her a sheepish smile. Her stern, stone-faced expression stopped his approach.

  “Well,” Nick asked, “Now what?”

  “We’ll take a break for now and continue once the all-clear is given,” she said, “Might as well have a seat and get comfortable.”

  Nick sat back down, but he was restless. They sat in silence for several moments while Nick fidgeted in the chair. Paige continued to fiddle around with the desk, looking for more information. He watched her for a few moments while her eyes were glued to the desktop. She was gorgeous, someone Nick would have been too nervous to talk to back home. He felt compelled to talk to her, to strike up some conversation where he could learn more about her, but he felt this was a ridiculous time to do that. Eventually, Nick gave up on the idea, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

  Once again, he heard booted footsteps running down the corridor on the other side of the door. Both Nick and Paige looked up and stared in the direction of the sound. Suddenly, a loud bang reverberated through the room as something slammed into the wall adjacent to the door. They both jumped slightly at the sudden sound.

  Then, they heard the screech. An inhuman cry came from the corridor; a high-pitched, hair-raising sound that caused Nick to clench the arms of the chair. He had heard that sound before. His mind flashed back to the scene in the desert, looking over the mangled body of Mr. Winters. He remembered the blood that had seeped from the old man’s wounds. He remembered the glimpse, the passing shadow, which passed through the light of his flashlight that night. He remembered that inhuman screech; it was an unforgettable sound.

  Nick’s sense of dread grew as they heard another scream, this one far too recognizable as that of another man. The scream suddenly stopped and there was another bang, this one slightly softer than the first.

  “What the hell was that?” Nick asked.

  “Quiet,” she said, raising a finger to her lips. “If we can hear them, they can hear us.”

  They heard nothing else though. They both sat there for another tension-filled couple of minutes, but there were no further sounds. Nick had had enough sitting around. He quietly got up and walked slowly to the door. He pressed his ear up against it and listened. There was nothing to be heard. He turned his head and was startled to find Paige standing right behind him.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he whispered, “Now what?”

  “We wait,” she said.

  “For how long?”

  “As long as we need to,” she said and returned to her desk.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s going on out there?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, “What do you think you’ll accomplish by blindly charging out there? Let the professionals handle this one.”

  Nick blushed. She didn’t call him ‘kid’ but she might as well have. He could hear it in her tone of voice. He looked away from her back toward the door. Despite her protests, Nick was very anxious to get the door open. He didn’t like being trapped in this room, but he saw no recourse except to sit and wait it out. He plopped down onto the floor next to the door and leaned his back against the wall.

  “Has this-”

  Nick’s question was cut short by a high-pitched, warbling siren. The red lights in the room returned to their normal white, a pair of red flashing lights appeared over the door, and the door slid open.

  “Evacuation alarm,” she yelled over the din of the siren, “We need to get out of here!”

  She quickly yanked open the bottom left drawer of her desk and pulled out a stun gun. It was a slim, gray, egg-shaped projectile weapon that fit into the palm of her hand. Nick had seen them used b
y the police before, but only on the news. He eyed it nervously as she stuffed it in the inside pocket of her blazer.

  Paige looked up from the desk, took a step toward the door, and froze. Her face went pale and her mouth hung open in shock. Nick pulled himself quickly off the floor and turned to look. The wall opposite the door in the corridor was covered by a long splatter of blood.

  Cautiously, he poked his head into the corridor. Several bodies were strewn across the floor. To the immediate left of the opening lay the body of a young male security officer. His head had been reduced to a bloody, mutilated stump atop his body. The rest of it seemed to be smeared across the wall on their side of the corridor. That explained the bang on the wall, Nick thought.

  There were two other bodies down the corridor to his right. One had a gaping hole burned right through his chest; the other bled out through a series of savage lacerations on the head, neck, and chest. A pool of blood covered the floor.

  The siren continued to wail in the background. With the flashing lights in the hallway, the noise of the alarm, the sight of the carnage, the smell of burned flesh, and the general shock of the scene, Nick’s mind became overloaded and he suddenly dropped to one knee.

  He was about to fall forward into the bloody mess that remained of the officer to the left of the door, when he felt Paige’s hand grab him firmly by the shoulder. He felt her other hand pat his other shoulder and he straightened up. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his shoulder as she spoke into his ear.

  “Come on. We have to get out of here!”

  He nodded and pulled himself to his feet. Nick turned to face the Doctor for just a moment; her face was taught with grim determination.

  “Just stick close to me, all right,” she yelled, “I’ll lead the way.”

  She started to charge past, but Nick reached out and grabbed her elbow.

  “I can’t leave yet,” Nick yelled. Her brow furrowed as she looked at him without comprehension. “Security picked up someone else, a friend of mine. He’s being held here somewhere. I have to find him.”

  She shook her head. “No way. We need to get out of here. We don’t have time for side trips.”

  Nick wasn’t going to give in on this one. He couldn’t abandon Max. He was the reason that Max was picked up and he would make sure Max got out of here.

  “Then, I will go without you,” Nick yelled. He steeled himself mentally and then started down the hallway to the right. He stepped around the bodies and grimaced as he was forced to take a step in the pool of blood. He reached the end of the hall and hesitated as he tried to figure out if he should go left or right. He saw nothing that would help him make the decision.

  He decided to go left, stepped forward, and felt a hand on his shoulder. Nick nearly jumped out of his skin. He pulled away from the touch and spun around, putting his hands up to defend himself. He let out a sigh of relief when it turned out to be Paige. She gave him an aggravated glare and pointed to the right.

  Moments later, they came across two more bodies in the corridor, one with a giant hole burned through the head and the other with an arm ripped off and a severely broken neck. Nick tried not to look at the bodies as they continued on. Eventually, they arrived at an emergency stairwell and descended one floor.

  They stepped around another corpse as they exited the stairwell. They had yet to see any evidence of what had done this. Nick had an idea what it was though, or at least, he knew where it was from. The rising levels of carbon dioxide on the ship, the now ominous words of Doctor Sinclair, something about sending the Conglomerate something he’d been working on for a long time, the crates that they could not break into, and that blood-curdling unforgettable screech all pointed to a conclusion that Nick struggled to accept. There were a hundred of those crates on the Hannah, Nick thought, and who knows how many on the other ships Sinclair dispatched.

  Nick tried to push the thought from his mind as they walked past a row of offices. They took another right and stopped. Paige stared straight ahead, unmoving. Nick noticed that her hand trembled slightly as it hung by her side. She started to reach inside her blazer pocket when Nick stepped around her.

  It took Nick’s brain a moment to understand that he was seeing something real. This was no special effect, this was no costume; the creature that lay ahead of him was real. His mind struggled to find the familiar in what he saw.

  The creature was incredibly large. Must be at least a foot taller than me, Nick thought. The skin of its body was jet black from its feet to the base of its neck. The thing looked mostly like a man with two arms and two legs, but so much of it was inhuman.

  Nick couldn’t help focusing his attention on the toes. Instead of normal human toes, there were three black, pointed claws, like those of a large bird. The claws on the feet were short and narrow, but Nick noticed that the ones that replaced its fingers were long, thick, and ended in a razor-sharp point.

  All around the thing’s body, Nick could see fine, black down settling onto the floor. The thing’s entire body was covered in feathers. It had been cut in several places; red blood poured down its torso.

  As Nick crept slowly closer to the prone creature, he noticed more unsettling features. Large wings protruded from its back. Finally, Nick saw a wiry neck and the enlarged head of a bird-of-prey where the head and neck of a man should have been. He stopped a moment and just stared; his brain could hardly comprehend what it was seeing.

  The head lolled unnaturally to the left, dangling down onto the torso. Its black eyes lay open and unmoving, reflecting a distorted image of Nick back at himself. Nick noticed a slightly bulbous, silver plate that covered the back of the head. This creature was made and not born; it was an abomination. This was the thing that had killed Winters, that they had brought here, and had now been unleashed upon this space station.

  Nick didn’t dare get too close for fear that the creature was still alive. Paige motioned for him to turn left past the creature. It took Nick several moments to work up the courage to get close enough to the thing to turn the corner. Nick closed his eyes, steeled himself, and took another step closer to it.

  It wasn’t until then that Nick noticed the large rifle with the custom grip that lay next to the beast’s right hand. It was a long, dull gray weapon of a type that Nick had never seen before. The trigger and grip seem to have been molded to the creature’s talon-shaped hands. He thought briefly about picking it up, but he didn’t dare reach down far enough to grab it. That would have put him within arm’s length of the beast.

  He rounded the corner, stopped about ten feet away from the creature, and waited for Paige to join him. Nick found that he could not take his eyes from the grotesque thing that lay there unmoving. How many of them were there? He shuddered at the thought of a horde of these things marching through the station’s corridors.

  Paige finally rounded the corner a minute later. She was visibly trembling. Where Nick couldn’t take his eyes from the creature, she couldn’t bring herself to look at it at all. It looked like it was taking all her strength not to run away. Her white-knuckled fists were balled tightly at her side. This time, Nick put a hand on her shoulder and she inhaled sharply. She let the breath out slowly and opened her eyes again.

  “Your friend should be in one of these rooms,” she said, her shaky voice barely audible above the continuing siren. Nick walked up to the nearest door and tried to trigger it by placing his right hand on the access pad. Nothing happened.

  “Locked,” Nick said. He was surprised they didn’t open when the evacuation order was given.

  “It wouldn’t be good if the detainees ran free. It’s assumed the responsible officer would escort them to safety.”

  “That assumes the responsible officer is still alive,” Nick responded, “How do we get in?”

  “Any officer should have the appropriate access,” Paige replied. The next gruesome step quickly became apparent.

  “I don’t suppose that includes you,” Nick said.

&
nbsp; She shook her head negatively. “Sorry. I’m an independent advisor, not an officer.”

  “Great,” Nick said. He looked back down the corridor. The last uniformed body he remembered seeing was about twenty meters back, just around the corner. Of course, that meant crossing paths with that thing again.

  “Wait here,” Nick said. She didn’t argue. Nick set off and again gingerly walked past the creature. He found the mangled body of another guard, a stout woman who had a gaping hole blown in her midsection. The wound was cauterized, apparently the product of the rifle the creature carried. Nick was thankful that she had not suffered wounds from those pointed talons.

  He grabbed the corpse’s still warm wrist and then hoisted the body over his shoulder. He was lucky; she couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds. Still, she was at the upper limit of what Nick could handle by himself. His first steps with the dead woman over his shoulder were tentative and clumsy. Maneuvering around the creature proved especially difficult as Nick struggled to do anything other than shuffle his feet along the floor.

  As he rounded the corner, his foot glanced off the creature’s toe. Nick froze; his breathing stopped. When the creature didn’t stir, Nick exhaled slowly and trudged on. The body hit the floor with a loud bang as he dropped it from his shoulders, a bang that betrayed the respect he was trying to show the dead officer.

  “Sorry,” Nick said.

  “Let’s just get this done.”

  Nick nodded and placed the dead woman’s hand on the access pad. The door slid open, but Nick was disappointed to find the room empty. It took three more tries, lugging the body from door to door and using her stiffening hand to deactivate the door lock, before they found the room Max was in.

  Max sat huddled against the far wall, knees pulled up to his chest, arms folded across his knees, with his head back and his eyes closed. Nick could see that Max was gently rocking back and forth to keep himself calm. With the siren still in alarm, Max didn’t hear the door slide open and continued to sit there with his eyes closed.